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T H E
B I R T H
O F
C H R I S T
by A. W. Tozer
Third, God indeed spoke by the prophets. The priests and scribes who were versed in the Scriptures could inform the troubled Herod that the Christ was to be born in Bethlehem of Judaea. And thereafter the Old Testament came alive in Christ. It was as if Moses and all the prophets hovered around Him, guiding His footsteps into the way of the prophetic Scriptures. So difficult was the Old Testament gamut the Mes siah must run to validate His claims that the possibility of anyone’s being able to do it seemed utterly remote; yet Jesus did it. His coming confirmed the veracity of the Old Testament Scriptures, even as those Scriptures confirmed the soundness of His own claims. Fourth, man is lost but not abandoned. The coming of Christ to the world tells us both of these things. Had men not been lost no Saviour would have been required. Had they been abandoned no Saviour would have come. But He came, and it is now established that God has a concern for men. Though we have sinned away every shred of merit, still He has not forsaken us. “ For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.” Fifth, the human race will not be exterminated. God did not visit the race to rescue it; in Christ He took human nature unto Himself, and now He is one of us. For this reason we may be certain that mankind will not be wiped out by a nuclear explosion or turned into subhuman monsters by the effects of radiation on the human genetic processes. Christ did not take upon Himself the nature of a race soon to be extinct. Sixth, this world is not the end. Christ spoke with cheerful certainty of the world to come. He reported on things He had seen and heard in heaven and told of the many mansions waiting us. We are made for two worlds and as surely as we now inhabit the one, we shall also inhabit the other. Seventh, death will some day be abolished and life and immortality hold sway. “ For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil,” and what more terrible work has the devil accomplished than to bring sin to the world and death by sin? But life is now made manifest by the appear ing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
“Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. . . . Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” T h e a n n o u n c e m e n t of the birth of Christ came as a sunburst of joy to a world where grief and pain are known to all and joy comes rarely and never tarries long. The joy the angel brought to the awe-struck shep- herds was not to be a disembodied wisp of religious emotion. Rather it was and is a state of lasting glad ness resulting from tidings that there was born in the city of David a Saviour which is Christ the Lord. It was an overflowing sense of well-being that had every right to be there. The birth of Christ told the world something. That He should come to be born of a woman, to make Him self of no reputation and, being found in fashion as a man, to humble Himself even to death on a cross— this is a fact so meaningful, so eloquent as to elude even the power of a David or an Isaiah fully to cele brate. His coming, I repeat, told the world something; it declared something, established something. What was it? First, that God is real. The heavens were opened and another world came into view. A message came from beyond the familiar world of nature. “ Glory to God in the highest,” chanted the celestial host, “ and on earth peace, good will.” Earth the shepherds know too well; now they hear from God and heaven above. Our earthly world and the world above blend into one scene. It is little wonder that they went in haste to see Him who had come from above. To them God was no longer a hope, a desire that He might be. He was real. Second, human life is essentially spiritual. With the emergence into human flesh of the Eternal Word of the Father the fact of man’s divine origin is confirmed. For God and man to unite they must be to some degree like each other. It had to be so. The Incarnation may indeed raise some questions, but it answers many more. The ones it raises are specu lative; the ones it settles are deeply moral and vastly important to the souls of men. Man’s creation in the image and likeness of God is one question it settles by affirming it positively. The Advent proves it to be a literal fact.
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15
DECEMBER, 1964
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